While professional photographers often go to great lengths to protect and keep their camera lenses clean, even professional photographers may not notice dirt, dust, oil, fingerprints, water droplets or other containments on a lens, sometimes referred to as a dirty lens condition, resulting in degradation to one or more images captured using a dirty camera lens. The problem of dirty camera lenses grows in the case of lower end camera devices where users often store the camera device, e.g., cell phone including a camera, in a pocket or other location where the lens may easily become dirty. Dirty camera lenses of laptop computers, pads, tablets or other devices which may also include cameras can also experience this problem.
While dirt on camera lenses can be a common problem that results in degraded images, the user is often unaware of the degradation in image quality and/or the need to clean a lens until the degradation due to the dirty lens becomes severe and noticeable.
Unfortunately, by the time a dirty camera lens or its effect is noticed by a user of a camera device the opportunity to clean the dirty lens and still capture particular scenes of interest in a timely manner may have passed.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that it would be desirable if methods or apparatus could be developed which detect and alert a user of a camera to a dirty lens condition.